O que fazer com a educação?

Maior exigência nos exames de Inglês e Matemática na cidade de Nova Iorque = catastrófico aumento da taxa de reprovações. Para ler aqui e aqui.

Algumas apontamentos a ter em conta:

• "This year, 61 percent of state students were deemed passing, or at grade level, in math, compared with 86 percent last year. Students also performed dismally on the English tests, with 53 percent passing, down from 77 percent.
• The scoring adjustment could raise questions about the precision of educational testing, even as policy makers across the country, including President Obama, are relying on tests to determine teachers’ pay and whether a school should be shut.  (...)
• New York State said the tests had become too easy, with some questions varying little from year to year, making it simple for teachers to prepare students because each test is made publicly available after it is given. So this year, the state made the questions less predictable and raised the number of correct answers needed to pass the tests, which are given to every student from the third through the eighth grades. (...)
• New York City officials said that if previous scores were adjusted to the new standards, the city would still show substantial progress over the past decade (...)
• The Bloomberg administration has relied on the exams to carry out one of its most contentious policies: requiring every student who scores at Level 1, the lowest, to attend summer school and pass a retest or repeat the grade. (...)" Standards Raised, More Students Fail Tests, Jennifer Medina, publicado em 28 Julho, 2010

 Observações:

- Testes não fiáveis acabam por ser a base para atribuição de avaliação a escolas e professores. Mas os alunos melhoraram ou não? É que os testes dizem que sim (se fossem iguais aos do ano passado, os resultados seriam melhores) e dizem que não (o nível de exigência aumentou: os resultados pioraram).
-  "Treinar" alunos para testes não é um modelo a seguir.
-  Quem não atinge os objectivos mínimos, passa a ter umas "férias de Verão" um pouco diferentes...
-  As famosas "charter schools" não escaparam à hecatombe, como se confirma no segundo artigo:

"At the main campus of the Harlem Promise Academy, one of the city’s top-ranked charter schools, proficiency in third-grade math dropped from 100 percent to 56 percent."

 E a directora de uma escola comenta, assim, o futuro imediato:

“We are ordering a grammar book ASAP; that was a weakness,” she added. “We are going to push in professional development for teaching that is different for each child. We have to keep training our teachers, even though we lost our reading teacher because budgets were cut. We are going to have to make lemonade out of lemons.” When 81% Passing Suddenly Becomes 18%, Sharon Otterman e Robert Gebeloff, 1 Agosto, 2010.

Pois. E uma limonada, para saber bem, tem mesmo de ter limões.